Red Sea nations churning over pirates

Worried that piracy could scare ships away from the Suez Canal, Egypt on Thursday held emergency talks with nations bordering the Red Sea on how to stop brazen Somali gunmen from hijacking oil tankers and other vessels.

The Cairo meeting was called amid concerns that lawlessness was disrupting sea lanes and creating panic that might force shipping companies to avoid sailing the Red Sea region. Such a scenario would hurt the Egyptian economy, which relies on more than $5 billion a year in fees collected from vessels passing through the Suez Canal.

The scourge of pirates comes as the Middle East is increasingly sensitive to the global financial crisis, which has pushed oil below $50 a barrel and is depressing markets and affecting trade, real estate and other businesses.

Fewer freighters coming through the region would further strain countries linked to transportation and oil and could spark social and political unrest.

Diplomats from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan and Jordan balanced their concerns over chaos on the seas with assurances to respect the sovereignty of the troubled government of Somalia, a country in the Horn of Africa that is scarred by civil war and rife with buccaneers, militants and gunrunners.

A statement released after Thursday’s meeting did not suggest the delegates had come up with immediate solutions. It said they “expressed the anxiety of Arab states overlooking the Red Sea toward the growth of the phenomenon of piracy. . . . Piracy off the Somali coast is one of the consequences of the deterioration of the political, security and humanitarian situation in Somalia.”

Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki was quoted by the state news agency as saying, “All options are open.” He added that Egypt’s national security agencies would decide “whether a diplomatic and political solution would be preferred.”

The Red Sea nations also faced the prospect of how to end a standoff with pirates who Saturday captured a 1,000-foot tanker carrying $100 million worth of Saudi crude. The bandits anchored the ship off the Somali coast and were holding the crew hostage.

The gunmen reportedly were negotiating with Saudi officials and demanding $25 million to release the Sirius Star and its crew.

“We are not talking here about conventional pirates but about organized gangs who have a lot of money, weapons and demonstrate organizational abilities and good knowledge of ship technology that allow them to catch ships quickly,” said Mohammed Abdel Salam, a national security expert with Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Zipping around in swift rubber boats and brandishing automatic weapons, Somali pirates have seized at least 80 ships off the Horn of Africa this year. The tactics have made perilous the shipping routes in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen that lead to the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. In October, Egypt collected $467.5 million in shipping fees from the canal.

If the fees are jeopardized, “Egyptian prestige will also be undermined because a failure to protect such a strategic resource would prove that Egypt has a very limited regional and military leverage,” Salam said. “If we fail to counter this piracy and companies realize that countries along the Red Sea cannot protect the waterways, the impact will be tremendous.”

The Red Sea nations, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, were expected to discuss the possibility of joint naval and military operations to secure the seas. The U.S., India, Russia and European nations have naval forces patrolling near the Gulf of Aden.

“The phenomenon is threatening navigation in the Red Sea, causing some vessels to take other routes,” Zaki was quoted as saying.

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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

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Noha El-Hennawy of The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.